Top 67 Esther Perel Quotes
#2. Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.
Esther Perel
#3. On some level we trade passion for security, that's trading one illusion for another. It's a matter of degree. We can't live in constant fear, but we can't live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love.
Esther Perel
#4. We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.
Esther Perel
#5. I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships.
Esther Perel
#7. Excitement is interwoven with uncertainty, and with our willingness to embrace the unknown rather than to shield ourselves from it. But this very tension leaves us feeling vulnerable. I caution my patients that there is no such thing as safe sex.
Esther Perel
#8. Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that's flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven't had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.
Esther Perel
#9. Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy
Esther Perel
#10. The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.
Esther Perel
#11. Oscar Wilde wrote, "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it." When
Esther Perel
#12. Eroticism. Though I doubt that they ever used this word, they embodied its mystical meaning as a quality of aliveness, a pathway to freedom
Esther Perel
#13. When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
Esther Perel
#14. Women - - and men - - need to understand that a woman's transition is often much longer. The caretaker must leave the place of orientation to the needs of others to the place where she focuses on herself.
Esther Perel
#15. We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
Esther Perel
#16. Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies. This never-ending dance between change and stability is like the anchor and the waves.
Esther Perel
#17. Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.
Esther Perel
#18. My husband deals with pain; I deal with pleasure. They are intimately acquainted.
Esther Perel
#19. There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.
Esther Perel
#20. In committed sex, in marriage, people don't feel the need to seduce or to build anticipation - - that's an effort they think they no longer need to do now that they have conquered their partner. If they're in the mood, their partner should be too.
Esther Perel
#21. Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
Esther Perel
#22. We no longer get work out of our children; today we get meaning.
Esther Perel
#23. Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.
Esther Perel
#24. The secret to desire in a long-term relationship
Esther Perel
#25. The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It is a creative force that can help us transcend reality.
Esther Perel
#26. You never know your partner as well as you think.
Esther Perel
#27. Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do.
Esther Perel
#28. Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They're complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn't be translated into literal intent. Think poetry, not prose,
Esther Perel
#29. In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, "Whew, at last I'm in a place where I don't have to worry," or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner.
Esther Perel
#30. It's hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.
Esther Perel
#31. The attraction of dating is that you don't take yes for granted - - you're fully engaged, there's seductiveness, tension.
Esther Perel
#32. Love is an exercise in selective perception
Esther Perel
#33. When we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner we're turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.
Esther Perel
#34. A # peer relationship is one where the partners experience an affectionate, companionate coupledom.
They are friends. They are the product of the egalitarian model; they are good life partners, but are often less sexual.
Esther Perel
#35. In my work, I see couples who no longer wait for an invitation into their partner's interiority, but instead demand admittance, as if they are entitled to unrestricted access into the private thoughts of their loved ones
Esther Perel
#36. I got rid of my motorcycle when Jimmy was born. I'm not allowed to die in a bike crash anymore.
Esther Perel
#37. Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
Esther Perel
#38. In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.
Esther Perel
#39. The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner.
Esther Perel
#40. People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn't begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.
Esther Perel
#41. If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.
Esther Perel
#42. There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.
Esther Perel
#43. The body often contains emotional truths that words can too easily gloss over.
Esther Perel
#44. Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day - the erotic mind is not very politically correct.
Esther Perel
#45. Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans.
Esther Perel
#46. As long as men completely dominate business and political life, as long as women are economically dependent on men, as long as the burden of child care falls wholly on women's shoulders (toppling even the most egalitarian couples), you cannot speak of a liberated female sexuality.
Esther Perel
#47. You know what happens to sex in marriage? Instead of inviting desire, you monitor it. Especially men: You let her sleep late, you take the kids to the park, and all that time you're thinking, "Tonight I'll get some." That doesn't work.
Esther Perel
#48. Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudoconnectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others.
Esther Perel
#49. Acceptance doesn't mean predictability. Sex isn't always for 11 at night - - it's also 'meet at a hotel room at noon'. What you feel during dating can exist at home, if you don't suffocate it.
Esther Perel
#50. Eroticism challenges us to seek a different kind of resolution, to surrender to the unknown and ungraspable, and to breach the confines of the rational world.
Esther Perel
#51. Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.
Esther Perel
#52. Because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving,can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
Esther Perel
#53. The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Esther Perel
#54. Very often we don't go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn't so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.
Esther Perel
#55. Our partner's sexuality does not belong to us. It isn't just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.
Esther Perel
#56. What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
Esther Perel
#57. Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.
Esther Perel
#58. In my community there were two groups of people, There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life.
Esther Perel
#59. There is no sex without a cue. People who date have their cues at home, before they meet. You think about where to go, what to eat, what to do and say. Sometimes the cue is short - - just before we reach the bar - - but sex is never just spontaneous. Spontaneity is a myth.
Esther Perel
#60. Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.
Esther Perel
#61. Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.
Esther Perel
#62. Are you asking a question because you want to know the answer or are you asking the question because you want your partner to know that you are having this question?
Esther Perel
#63. It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.
Esther Perel
#64. there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent,
Esther Perel
#65. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
Esther Perel
#66. The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture.
Esther Perel
#67. Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become.
Esther Perel
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